People reaching for sect. 8 vouchers through the bars at housing authority on Turk st. SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more of the 11 sites where city is handing out Section 8 applications. Large crowds gathered to pick up their form.
by Vince Maggiora less

People reaching for sect. 8 vouchers through the bars at housing authority on Turk st. SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more of the ... more

Photo: VINCE MAGGIORA

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Jim Williams one of many with the housing athority handing out sect. 8 vouchers on Turk st. SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more of the 11 sites where city is handing out Section 8 applications. Large crowds gathered to pick up their form.
by Vince Maggiora less

Jim Williams one of many with the housing athority handing out sect. 8 vouchers on Turk st. SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more ... more

Photo: VINCE MAGGIORA

Image 3 of 4

VOUCHERS-C-04SEP01-MT-VM SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more of the 11 sites where city is handing out Section 8 applications. Large crowds gathered to pick up their form.
by Vince Maggiora less

VOUCHERS-C-04SEP01-MT-VM SF Housing Authority reopens its waiting list for Sect. 8 vouchers for first time in 3 years. Tuesday at one or more of the 11 sites where city is handing out Section 8 applications. ... more

Photo: VINCE MAGGIORA

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Desperate clutch for subsidized shelter / S.F. applicants in frenzy

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2001-09-05 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco -- On the first day in three years that San Francisco reopened its waiting list for rental vouchers to poor families, hundreds of housing-hungry people lined up yesterday to pick up applications.

At the Housing Authority's main office on Turk Street, one of 11 distribution sites that opened at 8 a.m., people began gathering before dawn in a line that wound around the block as a testament to the high cost of living in the Bay Area.

Before the doors opened, a frenzy of impatient applicants shoved their hands through bars blocking the doorway to grab at city workers carrying the forms for the Section 8 rental subsidies.

Several hundred more people -- speaking languages from Russian to Vietnamese -- lined up in Civic Center Plaza and waited more patiently for officials to hand out the papers.

It's a scene that has been repeated throughout the region every time a city or county reopens its Section 8 waiting list and prepares to dole out its share of vouchers from the federal government.

Masses of poor residents applied when the Oakland Housing Authority recently opened its list for the first time in three years. The same occurred when Alameda County opened its list af-

ter nine years and Stanislaus County after being closed for two years.

The government vouchers pay for as much as two-thirds of a family's rent and are the primary means of federal housing assistance to low- and very low- income people. To qualify, families earn, at most, 50 percent of the region's median family income. In San Francisco, that means a qualifying family of four earns $42,500 a year.

The San Francisco Housing Authority last reopened its Section 8 voucher waiting list in 1998, when 38,000 people applied and 10,000 qualified for the list. Now that the old list is nearly exhausted, the city is finally ready to take on more names.

The Housing Authority printed 50,000 applications, and Acting Executive Director Gregg Fortner expects his agency will distribute every one between now and Sept. 21, the last day to apply.

"The significance is we expect 30,000-40,000 people to apply. We may have 2, 000 Section 8 vouchers available -- and right now we have another 16,000 people on the public housing wait list," Fortner said. "We always have more need than we have resources."

Nationwide, about 1 million households are on Section 8 waiting lists, with an average waiting time of 28 months, according to a 1999 study by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which pays for the local Section 8 programs.

Wendy Butler, a 38-year-old single mother and drug counselor, said yesterday that she has been on and off the San Francisco waiting list for 14 years. She believes that she remained a low priority all these years because she earns a salary, albeit a small one.

"But, hopefully, this time I'll get it," Butler said as she picked up the one-page, two-sided application yesterday morning.

Linda Atlas, 46, towed her two young children from their Richmond home to San Francisco to collect her application. Atlas, who receives state welfare, said she is being evicted from her $850 one-bedroom rental and has been searching for an equally affordable new home -- unsuccessfully -- for weeks.

"It's really hard," Atlas said. "I've been from Stockton to Willits. And I can't afford to pay people's mortgage."

Although San Francisco's average asking price for a rental is the second highest in the nation, just behind New York, Fortner said now is as good a time as any to get a voucher.

"The good thing about opening (the list) now is the vacancy rate has gone from below 1 percent when I moved here in November to close to 5 percent now," Fortner said.

During the past few years of skyrocketing rents, accelerated by the once red-hot dot-com economy, there's been no guarantee that someone with a voucher could find housing in the Bay Area. In too many cases, the vouchers no longer covered the high rents despite federal government attempts to raise their value in the Bay Area.

In fact, Fortner said, only about 25 percent of San Francisco voucher holders find housing before the certificate expires after a few months.

In Oakland, about half the voucher holders find housing, which is an improvement over the 30 percent success rate about a year ago.

"It's good, but it's still very bad," said Joseph Villarreal, director of leased housing for the Oakland Housing Authority.

Villarreal said the reason so many cities and counties are reopening their lists now is partly coincidence and partly the volatile real estate market.

As more families failed to find housing with their vouchers in the past few years and their certificates expired, he said, other families quickly moved up the wait list.

San Francisco will be distributing applications for its new wait list through Sept. 21, when all forms must be mailed back to the Housing Authority. A lottery will determine spots on the waiting list.

Some people will be served first, however, including military veterans, participants in the Welfare-to-Work program, San Francisco residents, people living in substandard housing and people with HIV or AIDS.